Daily Archives: January 16, 2013

A new report, Health Online 2013, from PEW Internet shows how much the Internet is being used to get health information. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s not higher.

“81% of U.S. adults use the internet and 59% say they have looked online for health information in the past year. 35% of U.S. adults say they have gone online specifically to try to figure out what medical condition they or someone else might have.”

Searchers usually began at a search engine. Only a few sought a trusted health site – suggesting that there is much for people to learn about researching health matters online.

When asked to think about the last time they hunted for health or medical information, 77% of online health seekers say they began at a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Another 13% say they began at a site that specializes in health information, like WebMD. Just 2% say they started their research at a more general site like Wikipedia and an additional 1% say they started at a social network site like Facebook.

The Internet is abuzz with news about Facebook’s new Graph Search for people, photos, places and interests across subscribers’ networks. At present, this is only available by invitation in the United States, but many have seen enough to describe it and run some screencasts.

Facebook Search for People, Places, Things

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, announced the new search –

““We are not indexing the Web,” Zuckerberg said. “We are indexing our map of the [social] graph.” Users can navigate through the 240 billion photos on the network, the trillions of user “likes,” and the connections between users. But they can only see content that users have specified as either public and/or viewable to others in their network. Users “want a search tool that can help you get access to things that people have just shared with you,” Zuckerberg said.”

Examples of questions – restaurants friends in San Francisco like, movies any friends have liked, music liked by people who like John Lennon.

Where there are no results, Facebook pulls in Bing for a web search.

Matt Miller speaking at Bloomberg found it couldn’t handle a lot of questions yet. (Video – Facebook’s New Graph Search ‘Has a Long Way to Go’ 2:13 min) Good for finding pictures of friends and the restaurants and music they like, not so good for details. He agreed with the interviewer it could be good for dating, and concluded that he had too much information in the public domain.